HTNet - A Notepad of Tech, Business, Science and Self Improvement

In the aftermath of an accident where 7 year old, Nur Salina Saparedi was killed, TV stations have been painted as “not practising proper ethiques” by Deputy Information Minister Datuk Zainuddin Maidin (he’s the ugly guy on the second last row, last picture).

Basically, this guy thinks that the coverage of the ensuing protests over the death of young Nur Salina, where some participants placed a coffin in the middle of the road shouldn’t be given such a priority to be aired on primetime. He said that the incident was “visually unpleasant” and “not normal”.

Well Datuk, losing a child who was needlessly killed in an accident is visually unpleasant and not normal.

Sometimes, I just feel that if only more Malaysian politicians at least try to use their brains a bit before talking, this country would be a much better place.

My deepest condolences go to the family and friends of Nur Salina.

Finally, I’m off from Malaysia’s No. 1 incompetent web host… and very happy to do so. In a way, those dimwits has dented my “Malaysia Boleh” faith… but whatever, life goes on.

I’ve migrated HTNet and my company’s webby. It’s been a year since I last used a cPanel based hosting package, and after being tortured by the annoyances of Plesk… I treasure the change. Not to mention the availability of ssh, which makes my life much easier by just updating my sites using wget, cvs or svn. Life is such so much easier now!

Anyway, my real beef with Mercumaya is that there was a time when their server was down. Well, shit happens, I can accept that… I was a support engineer myself once. But the unacceptable part was that none of their staff had the common courtesy of informing me, a customer, about this issue. Not by email, not by phone… and we’re in the same country. When I called, the person answering said that the hard disks were busted… and they might take 3-4 hours to “fix” it (which I assumed actually means replacing it and restoring from backup).

Well, that 3-4 hours turned to 3-4 days. On the fourth day, my friend Omar, who’s hosting his site, as well as some customers on Mercumaya too, gave me a call and said that he contacted Mercumaya and they informed him that the server is now up again. However, they totally fscked our data. Yeah, daily backups my ass.

All in all, I just know that they’ll go bust soon anyway. Idiots who treat their customers that way, usually won’t make it far. For me, it’s just a case of good riddance to bad rubbish.

The Xfce development team is glad to announce Xfce 4.2.2, a maintenance and bug fix release of Xfce 4.2 (current latest stable branch of Xfce). The changelog is available here.

As usual, source and binary packages are available from Xfce.org and all the usual mirrors. os-cillation will usually release the excellent Xfce installer for this version soon.

New gaim packages are available for Slackware 9.0, 9.1, 10.0, 10.1, and -current to fix several security issues. Sites that use GAIM should upgrade to the new version.

Here are the details from the Slackware 10.1 ChangeLog:

+————————–+
patches/packages/gaim-1.3.0-i486-1.tgz: Upgraded to gaim-1.3.0. This fixes a
few bugs which could be used by a remote attacker to annoy a GAIM user by
crashing GAIM and creating a denial of service.
(* Security fix *)
+————————–+

For others like me, who uses Slackware-current, the long awaited upgrade of glibc to include NPTL support is finally over! Read the Slackware-current changelog for more information. However, it will take a while for all mirrors to synch… so be patient.

You can upgrade necessary packages by manually downloading the packages. Or use automated updating tools such as Swaret or slapt-get.

My company will be conducting a free senior management seminar this Tuesday (17 May) as well as on June the 2nd.

Seats for the 17th May appointment is very limited, so if you’re in middle to senior management positions, and is available on the dates stated above, feel free to register online to confirm your seat(s).

This seminar will be a great opportunity to network with the who’s who of Corporate Johor. Looking forward to see you there.